The Pirates were pretty good last season, they just didn’t have enough quality wins to earn an NCAA berth. Can they change that up in 2026?
Team: Seton Hall Pirates
2024-25 Record: 23-10, 13-5 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Third, coming in three games behind Creighton and one game ahead of Marquette.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #75
Her Hoop Stats: #88
BartTorvik.com: #66
Postseason? Does a 48-40 win over Xavier in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament really count as a win? That’s what they did before losing 73-44 to Creighton in the semifinals. ANYWAY, the Pirates still earned a #3 seed in the WBIT and beat Quinnipiac in the first round before taking a 61-55 home loss to Portland in the next round. At least Marquette had the decency to lose on the road.
Notable Departures: The big one is Faith Masonius, who came to South Orange for her bonus season of eligibility. She ended up leading the squad in points and rebounds, and she went out with career bests in both scoring and assists average. The scoring thing is notable, because Masonius wasn’t much in the way of a shooter with just 61 attempts the entire year and she only hit 31% of them anyway.
Seton Hall loses two more every game starters in I’Yanna Lops and Amari Wright. It was the second of two years with SHU for Lops, who averaged 8.6 points, 4.8 rebounds, and a team high 1.4 blocks in just over 27 minutes a game. Wright was a Pirate for five seasons, rolling as a starter for the past two. Her assist numbers came way down in 2024-25 to just 3.8 per game, but that was still good enough for best on the team.
All three of those women were expected departures based on eligibility, and the same can be said for Kaydan Lawson. She was at Virginia for four seasons before coming to Seton Hall, and other than a chunk of six games in late November and early December, she was good for 20ish minutes a game or so. The 6’0” guard wasn’t much of a shooter (under 27% from three) but ended up averaging a career high 5.6 points and added 3.9 rebounds.
SHU’s lone unexpected loss is Joniyah Bland-Fitzpatrick, who leaves South Orange after two seasons to transfer to Bowling Green. After not doing much as a freshman, the 5’10” forward averaged 12.1 minutes per game after finally getting on the court for the first time in mid-December, but that’s misleading. She played just 17 total minutes in Seton Hall’s four postseason games, with 11 of them coming in the 29 point loss to Creighton.
Notable Returners: Seton Hall returns two of their top three scorers from last season. The key will be keeping them on the court the whole time, as Jada Eads (13.8 ppg) and Savannah Catalon (13.5 ppg) missed four and nine games respectively….. although SHU was 4-0 without Eads. Even though the pair are listed at 5’7” and 5’8” respectively, they both contributed on the glass with Eads actually coming up at #3 on the team and landing as the best returning rebounder. Eads also finished third on the team in assists behind Wright and Masonius, so she’s the top returner there as well.
Seton Hall also returns one-half of their theological named newcomers from last season, as Messiah Hunter still has eligibility remaining. She didn’t contribute much on the stat sheet, but she averaged a career best 15.5 minutes while appearing in every game and starting eight times.
Officially, it’s good news that Shailyn Pinkney is on the roster, as I think SHU could definitely use her 6.4 points and 3.4 rebounds per game, not to mention her 33% three-point shooting. However, there’s definitely questions to be asked as to whether or not she’s going to be available for Game 1 after suffering a season ending knee injury in mid-December last year. She had started in seven of SHU’s nine games up to that point, and her usage had jumped big time in her last four contests. In those four, she was averaging 9.0 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 2.0 assists and knocking down 36% of her threes. If she’s healthy, that’s great news for the Pirates.
Notable Additions: It seems that Seton Hall’s three incoming transfers can all be categorized as “well, maybe a change of surroundings is just what they needed.” Jordana Codio (6’1” guard) was at Texas for three years, playing for two after rehabbing an injury in her first year in Austin. The former top 100 prospect according to ESPN has averaged less than five minutes per game while playing in 40 contests for the Longhorns. The good news? Her per-40 minute numbers are 13.0 points, 5.1 rebounds, and 2.2 steals per game.
Cam Rust (6’1” forward) was a freshman at Penn State last season. Even though she was a top 100 prospect in ESPN’s eyes, she played 4.9 minutes on average in 19 appearances. Mariana Valenzuela (6’2” forward) has usually averaged double digit minutes for Florida State in her three years of action, even with a knee injury robbing her of playing time in 2023-24. But her career averages in 80 games for the Seminoles are just 4.1 points and 2.5 rebounds in 13.4 minutes.
None of Seton Hall’s five freshman pop up in a search on Blue Star basketball, and there’s nothing incredibly overwhelmingly amazing in any of their official team biographies. With just four returning rotation players — maybe just three depending on Pinkney? — and three transfers of at least questionable reliability, the door is open for at least one of these women to grab a role and hold it down right out of the gate.
Coach: Tony Bozzella, entering his 26th season as a Division 1 head coach and 13th at Seton Hall. He has a record of 210-151 with the Pirates, 396-365 in Division 1, and 516-469 as a collegiate head coach.
Outlook: It’s possible that the combination of Seton Hall losing at home to Princeton on November 21 and again at home to Marquette on February 12th (without Savannah Catalon!) cost them a bid in the NCAA tournament. The seven point loss to the Golden Eagles was their worst loss when it came time for selection, and their loss to a NET top 50 Tigers team was by just three points. If you flip those two results, yeah, SHU is 0-7 against top 30 teams, but then undefeated against the entire rest of the schedule. Maybe it’s iffy with zero Quadrant 1 wins, but you have to at least wonder if the Pirates were that close.
Then again, they were flying a little too close to the sun all season long, too. 56-55 at Villanova. Needed overtime at home against Georgetown. 51-40 at home over Providence isn’t exciting anyone. Following up a 59-57 escape in Cincinnati against Xavier with a 48-40 W in the Big East tournament against the Musketeers six days later raises an awful lot of question marks. Am I nitpicking? Maybe, but the NET nitpicks these things, too. Barely escaping teams you should be beating soundly hurts the ol’ ranking there, and that’s how you end up in the 70s instead of maybe the 50s and a little bit closer to the tournament conversation. Flip those losses on the margin, and that’s another bump upwards towards tournament contention.
This conversation is important at this point, because a year ago, I noted that Seton Hall hasn’t been in the NCAA tournament since 2016. That streak continues, even if we can easily say that Tony Bozzella’s roster management worked better in 2024-25 than it did the year before. The Pirates recorded 13 conference wins this past season, the most that they’ve put on the board since 2015, the first of two back-to-back NCAA tournament campaigns, and yes, those are the only two NCAA tournament campaigns that Bozzella has directed. It’s good that they had the wins…. but it’s not fun that the wins didn’t turn into enough to push them across the finish line.
Which brings us to this year, and I have a couple more questions as to what Seton Hall will be doing to fill in the gaps left open by the departure of Masonius et al. Jada Eads and Savannah Catalon are a good starting point to continue on from where the Pirates ended up last season. Even as small guards, they might be able to a lot of the heavy lifting that SHU will need.
After that though, if they want this season to end in a postseason appearance of any kind much less an NCAA tournament apperance, more than one roll of the dice is going to have to pay off for them. Maybe it’s just as simple as something like Ja’Kahla Craft popping after a freshman year where she played in 22 games and averaged less than 10 minutes a night. That’s the kind of numbers that leaves her juuuuuust on the outside looking in when I’m trying to decide who a Notable Returning Player is, especially when her minutes very much disappeared after New Year’s Day. Same goes for Savanna Jones, who appeared in 29 of 33 games but only hit double digits in minutes four times.
Maybe at least two of the transfers thrive in their new locations. Maybe both Jordana Codio and Cam Rust prove why they were top 100 prospects according to ESPN and turn into all-Big East performers. Maybe Mariana Valenzuela just keeps being a reliable cog and hits threes at her proven rate, and sometimes all you need to make a basketball team go is a quiet reliable component like her.
Let’s be clear: The worst case scenario for a Seton Hall team coached by Tony Bozzella is that they’re going to be a hard out on the schedule. Part of what we’re trying to do with these Vibe Checks is figure out where the ceiling is for the team, and right now, I don’t know if the ceiling is much more than “if this all works out, it’s a tournament team.”
When the best case is snapping a decade long drought, that’s not too bad, I suppose.